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🔗 Microbiology

Archaeal Richmond Mine acidophilic nanoorganisms (ARMAN) were first discovered in an extremely acidic mine located in northern California (Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain) by Brett Baker in Jill Banfield's laboratory at the University of California Berkeley. These novel groups of archaea named ARMAN-1, ARMAN-2 (Candidatus Micrarchaeum acidiphilum ARMAN-2 ), and ARMAN-3 were missed by previous PCR-based surveys of the mine community because the ARMANs have several mismatches with commonly used PCR primers for 16S rRNA genes. Baker et al. detected them in a later study using shotgun sequencing of the community. The three groups were originally thought to represent three unique lineages deeply branched within the Euryarchaeota, a subgroup of the Archaea. However, this has been revised, based on more complete archaeal genomic tree, that they belong to a super phylum named DPANN. The ARMAN groups now comprise deeply divergent phyla named Micrarchaeota and Parvarchaeota. Their 16S rRNA genes differ by as much as 17% between the three groups. Prior to their discovery all of the Archaea shown to be associated with Iron Mountain belonged to the order Thermoplasmatales (e.g., Ferroplasma acidarmanus).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Numbers 🔗 Measurement

The yottabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix yotta indicates multiplication by the eighth power of 1000 or 10²⁴ in the International System of Units (SI), and therefore one yottabyte is one septillion (one long scale quadrillion) bytes. The unit symbol for the yottabyte is YB. The yottabyte, adopted in 1991, is the largest of the formally defined multiples of the byte.

1 YB = 1000⁸bytes = 10²⁴bytes = 1000000000000000000000000bytes = 1000zettabytes = 1trillionterabytes

A related unit, the yobibyte (YiB), using a binary prefix, is equal to 1024⁸bytes (approximately 1.209 YB).

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Military history/Classical warfare

Polybolos, meaning "multi thrower" in Greek, was an ancient Greek repeating ballista reputedly invented by Dionysius of Alexandria, a 3rd-century BC Greek engineer at the Rhodes arsenal, and used in antiquity.

Philo of Byzantium encountered and described a weapon similar to the polybolos, a catapult that like a modern machine gun could fire again and again without a need to reload. Philo left a detailed description of the gears that powered its chain drive, the oldest known application of such a mechanism, and that placed bolt after bolt into its firing slot.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 C/C++ 🔗 C/C++/C

Cairo (stylized as cairo) is an open-source graphics library that provides a vector graphics-based, device-independent API for software developers. It provides primitives for two-dimensional drawing across a number of different back ends. Cairo uses hardware acceleration when available.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion

"Turtles all the way down" is an expression of the problem of infinite regress. The saying alludes to the mythological idea of a World Turtle that supports the earth on its back. It suggests that this turtle rests on the back of an even larger turtle, which itself is part of a column of increasingly large world turtles that continues indefinitely (i.e., "turtles all the way down").

The exact origin of the phrase is uncertain. In the form "rocks all the way down", the saying appears as early as 1838. References to the saying's mythological antecedents, the World Turtle and its counterpart the World Elephant, were made by a number of authors in the 17th and 18th centuries. This mythology is frequently assumed to have originated in ancient India and other Hinduist beliefs.

The expression has been used to illustrate problems such as the regress argument in epistemology.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Books 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Military history/Military historiography

Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (ISBN 0-06-103004-X) by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew, published in 1998 by PublicAffairs, is a non-fiction book about U.S. Navy submarine operations during the Cold War. Several operations are described in the book, such as the use of USS Parche to tap Soviet undersea communications cables and USS Halibut to do the same in Operation Ivy Bells.

The book also contains an extensive list of collisions between Western and Soviet submarines and U.S. submarine awards.

🔗 Cities

The world's most livable cities is an informal name given to any list of cities as they rank on an annual survey of living conditions. In addition to providing clean water, clean air, adequate food and shelter, a ‘livable’ city must also generate a sense of community and offer hospitable settings for all, especially young people, to develop social skills, a sense of autonomy and identity.

Regions with cities commonly ranked in the top 50 include Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Europe. Three examples of such surveys are Monocle's "Most Liveable Cities Index", the Economist Intelligence Unit's "Global Liveability Ranking", and "Mercer Quality of Living Survey". Numbeo has the largest statistics and survey data based on cities and countries. Deutsche Bank's Liveability Survey is another ranking of cities by quality of life.

🔗 Birds 🔗 Mythology

The barnacle goose myth is a widely-reported historical misconception about the breeding habits of the barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) and brant goose (Branta bernicla). One version of the myth is that these geese emerge fully formed from goose barnacles (Cirripedia). Other myths exist about how the barnacle goose supposedly emerges and grows from matter other than bird eggs.

The etymology of the term "barnacle" suggests Latin, Old English, and French roots. There are few references in pre-Christian books and manuscripts – some Roman or Greek. The main vector for the myth into modern times was monastic manuscripts and in particular the bestiary.

The myth owes its long-standing popularity to an early ignorance of the migration patterns of geese. Early medieval discussions of the nature of living organisms were often based on myths or genuine ignorance of what is now known about phenomena such as bird migration. It was not until the late 19th century that bird migration research showed that such geese migrate northwards to nest and breed in Greenland or northern Scandinavia.

🔗 Games 🔗 Circus

Siteswap is a numeric juggling notation used to describe or represent juggling patterns. It is also referred to as Quantum Juggling, or The Cambridge Notation. Siteswap may also be used to describe siteswap patterns, possible patterns transcribed using siteswap. Throws are represented by positive integers that specify the number of beats in the future when the object is thrown again: "The idea behind siteswap is to keep track of the order that balls are thrown and caught, and only that." It is an invaluable tool in determining which combinations of throws yield valid juggling patterns for a given number of objects, and has led to previously unknown patterns (such as 441). However, it does not describe body movements such as behind-the-back and under-the-leg. Siteswap assumes that, "throws happen on beats that are equally spaced in time."

For example, a three-ball cascade may be notated "3 ", while a shower may be notated "5 1".

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 United States/U.S. history

Gödel's Loophole is a "inner contradiction" in the Constitution of the United States which Austrian-German-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gödel claimed to have discovered in 1947. The flaw would have allowed the American democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. Gödel told his friend Oskar Morgenstern about the existence of the flaw and Morgenstern told Albert Einstein about it at the time, but Morgenstern, in his recollection of the incident in 1971, never mentioned the exact problem as Gödel saw it. This has led to speculation about the precise nature of what has come to be called "Gödel's Loophole". It has been called "one of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law."